Moms can protect their grandkids’ brains by eating these foods

The food that a pregnant woman eats can protect her child’s brain health — and maybe her grandchildren’s health, too.

That’s the conclusion from a new study, which found that certain foods containing a molecule called ursolic acid can guard the brain health of the eater’s offspring.

Researchers were investigating how nerve cells over time can become fragile and break, causing nerve deterioration and brain dysfunction.

“We asked whether natural products found in the diet can stabilize these [nerve cells] and prevent breakage,” professor Roger Pocock of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said in a news release.

Pocock’s team used roundworms as the test model for their study, published in Nature Cell Biology, because some of the animals’ genes are also found in humans.

The researchers were able to discover that foods high in ursolic acid trigger the production of a type of fat that protects the part of a nerve cell called the axon, which transmits nerve signals.

“We found that ursolic acid causes a gene to turn on that makes a specific type of fat,” Pocock said. “This particular fat also prevented axon fragility as animals age by improving axon transport and therefore its overall health.”

Ursolic acid is found in apples and several common herbs, including basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano and sage.

The specific type of fat, called a sphingolipid, travels from the mother’s intestine to eggs in the uterus, where it provides protection to axons in the next generation — and the one after that.

“This is the first time that a lipid/fat has been shown to be inherited,” Pocock said. “Further, feeding the mother the sphingolipid protects the axons of two subsequent generations.

“This means a mother’s diet can affect not just their offspring’s brain but potentially subsequent generations. Our work supports a healthy diet during pregnancy for optimal brain development and health,” he added.

Other recent research has found that nuts — specifically, walnuts, almonds, peanuts, pine nuts and hazelnuts, which have healthy fatty acids — eaten during the first trimester of pregnancy might help a child’s brain development.

Women who ate about three handfuls of nuts a week had children with better memories, higher levels of attention and improved thinking skills.

“The brain undergoes a series of complex processes during gestation and this means that maternal nutrition is a determining factor in fetal brain development and can have long-term effects,” said study leader Florence Gignac.

“We think that the beneficial effects observed might be due to the fact that the nuts provided high levels of folic acid and, in particular, essential fatty acids like omega-3 and omega-6,” Gignac added.